Aesthetic Confusion
Lazarus has not stopped asking: what happens to meaning when images are endlessly appropriated, circulated, and made into style? The answer she arrived at in 1993 is the seed of everything that follows. Aesthetic Confusion, her senior thesis at Cornell University, examined how Postmodern culture blurred the boundaries between advertising, mass media, kitsch, and fine art, questioning what happens to meaning when images are endlessly reproduced, appropriated, and transformed into style. She received an A+ from Stanley Bowman, one of the first artists exploring digital imaging as a fine art practice, and Steve Poleskie, the master printer who collaborated with Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenberg. Lazarus concluded that the only authentic style after postmodernism is one that accumulates cultures to honor what predates commodification. She was twenty-two. The tree was already in that conclusion.
Aesthetic Confusion — Thesis Statement, Cornell University, 1993
In the Age of Postmodernism, I find that there is an arbitrariness in aesthetic judgement. Minute aesthetic criteria are being established as the basis for general social competition with the spread of materialism, consumerism, and commodity fetishism. Everyday things we consume are acquiring the sombre resonance of great art. Artwork of great masters, such as DaVinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli, are appropriated to provide a source of images and symbols for consumer products. Great art is transformed into images of camp. Their original meanings are lost and all that is left is their association with the original.
The past is immediately available for consumption and history is deregulated. The period depends on copying and on restless Neophilia. A unique historical awareness which produced the concept of modernity manifested kitsch and avantgarde.
The original meanings of kitsch and avantgarde are opposite. Kitsch is a derivation from the German word meaning to cheapen, and avantgarde means to look very different. Just as the avant-garde places novelty and originality above all else, so banality and vulgarity are essential to kitsch. Kitsch has the external characteristics of art, but is actually a falsification of it. The modernist view was that kitsch was unreflective enjoyment.
Both avantgarde and kitsch have become the same thing, in the age of Postmodernism. They are the fruits of bourgeois capitalist society. Camp is a way of seeing and aestheticizing kitsch and avantgarde. It is seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Seeing, not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice and stylization. To emphasize style, one must slight content, or introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. For camp, art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface and style at the expense of content.
All camp objects, and persons contain a large element of artifice. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style, but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated. Postmodernism includes the stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purpose of mechanical reproduction. The appropriated objects become objects of camp. The only true style is that in which an accumulation of a variety of cultures are used to celebrate the organic precapitalist past.
The conclusion Lazarus reached then — that authentic style accumulates cultures to honor what predates commodification — is the origin of the tree. Everything since has been its elaboration.